"Retirees Now Frequently Base Their Retirement Decisions on the Portfolio Success Rates Found in Research Such as the Trinity Study.... This Is Not the Information They Need for Making Their Withdrawal Rate Decisions."

"Big Moves Out of Stocks Should Not Be Done at All. But Strategic Asset Allocation Can Be Done At Very Rare Times, Maybe Six Times in an Investor’s Lifetime, Three Times When the Market Is Stupidly High and Three Times When Stupidly Low."

"There Is An Extensive Literature About the Predictability of Long-Term Stock Returns. There Is an Extensive Literature About Short-Term Market Timing. My Question Is About Long-Term Market Timing. The Literature Seems Slim."

"For Years, the Investment Industry Has Tried to Scare Clients Into Staying Fully Invested in the Stock Market at All Times, No Matter How High Stocks Go. It's Hooey. They're Leaving Out More Than Half the Story."

"There Are Time-Periods Where Stocks Are a Terrible Addition to That Portfolio. Yet Inexplicably, We As Planners STILL tend to Suggest That It Is 'Risky' to Not Own Stocks When in Reality the Only Risk Is to Our Business."

"There Is a Growing Behavioral Economics Movement, But It So Far Has Had Limited Impact. Economists Are Not Fond of the Softness and Imprecision of Psychology. These Notions Are Considered Vaguely Unprofessional and Flaky."

"I Was Hooked on the Idea of [Passive] Index Indexing, But Something Inside Made Me Wonder "Too Good to Be True?" and "What's the Downside?" I Happened on to Your Site and Valuation-Informed Indexing Seems to Make Sense."

"Rob's Da Man! Never in the History of the Diehards Forum Has One Poster, Always Making Civil and Well Thought-Out Posts, Managed to Irritate So Many Without Anyone Being Able to Articulate a Good Reason As to Why."

"Rob Bennett: Some People Disagree With Him, and He Rubs a Lot of People the Wrong Way. But He Has Interesting Ideas About Valuation-Informed Indexing, and He Delves Into a Lot of What Makes a Successful Investing Strategy."

"The Return Predictor Is Based upon the Principle that Over the Long Term, Stock Market Prices Will Reflect the Ten-Years Earnings Growth of the Underlying Companies. Prices Return to a Common Growth Pattern."

"You Go About It in a Manner that is Catastrophically Unproductive by Adding Missionary Zeal that Inflates Your Importance and Demeans Others. The Whole Idea That There is a New School of Safe Withdrawal Rates Reeks of Personal Aggrandizement."

“What Warren Buffett Did Was Essentially Quite Close to What Rob Bennett Has Written. Buffett Has in Fact Been Cleverly Incorporating Long-Term Market Timing Based on Valuation of the Market in His Allocation of Money to Stocks.”

"You've Got to Say One Thing for Rob. He Has NEVER Lowered Himself to Ad Hominen Attacks -- Subliminal or Otherwise -- on Any Other Person on This Board. Not Once. Ever. At Least Give Him Credit for That."

"Mr. Bennett, You Are Spot on About Integrating Some Type of Valuation Filter to One's Stock Allocation. Astute Investors Have Incorporated Some Type of 'Valuation Timing' Into Their Investment Decisions Since the Beginning of Time."

"There Is Nothing More Doubtful of Success Than a New System. The Initiator Has the Enmity of All Who Profit By Preservation of the Old Institution and Merely Lukewarm Defenders in Those Who Gain By the New One."

"Difficult Subjects Can Be Explained to the Most Slow-Witted Man If He Has Not Formed Any Idea of Them. But the Simplest Thing Cannot Be Made Clear to the Most Intelligent Man If He Believes He Knows Already What Is Laid Before Him."

"I Certainly Have Seen the Academic Profession Squelching Unfashionable ideas and Have Often Been on the Wrong Side of It. Kuhn Shows How Most Pathbreaking Scientific Ideas Are Rejected at First, Usually for Decades.”

"Rob Bennett Was an Early Pioneer in 3rd Generation Modeling by Advocating (Through Various Online Forums) that Withdrawal Rates Must Be Adjusted for Market Valuations Consistent with Research by Campbell and Shiller."

"Rob Is an Enigma in the Personal Finance World. He Has Interesting Theories on Investing Based on Market Valuations. But He Weaves a Tale Which Makes the Stories of Alexander Litvinenko & Gareth Williams Seem Tame by Comparison."

"I Have Read Everything I Can About Valuation-Informed Indexing. Buy-and-Hold Is Extremely Problematic. I Respect the Passion, Hard Work and Research That You Have Put Into This Very Important Issue. Your Work Has Huge Value."

"The Amount of Return You Can Expect From a Diversified Equity Portfolio Is Inversely Correlated to the Market Valuation at the Start of the Holding Period. It Is One of the Most Robust Statistical Relationships in Modern Finance."

"I've Had Similar Experiences. I Know of Two Young Professors Who Wanted to Do Research on Fundamental Index and Reported to Me That Their Colleagues Advised Them That This Line of Research Could Derail Their Career Prospects."

"As with Drug Studies Funded by Drug Companies, It Would Be Churlish to Suppose that the Chicago School of Business Was in the Bag. But It Would Also Be Idealistic to Assume That There Was No Funding Bias at All."

"This Sort of Intimidation Is Not Acceptable. The Cigarette and Pharmaceutical Industries Found Research Supporting Their Products By Funding It. But That Was Big Money Supporting Outcomes, Not Dissuading Others."

"The Situation [Referring to the Intimidation Tactics Used to Silence Academic Researcher Wade Pfau's Reporting of the Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies] Seems Well Below Any Professional and Academic Acceptable Standards."

"It Is Obvious that Rob, in Attempting to Identify New Safe Withdrawal Rate Strategies...Is Goring Your Ox. If Rob Improves on [the] Safe Withdrawal Rate Methodology, the Implication Is Clear: You Are All, Metaphorically, Out of Business."

"Naturally, I Am Finding That Valuation-Informed Indexing Can Allow You to Reach a Wealth Target With a Lower Saving Rate and to Use a Higher Withdrawal Rate in Retirement Than You Could With a Fixed Allocation."

"A Careful Examination of Past Returns Can Establish Some Probabilities About the Prospective Parameters of Return, Offering Intelligent Investors a Basis for Rational Expectations About Future Returns."

"How Can It Be That One-Year Returns Are So Apparantly Random and Yet Ten-Year Returns Are Mostly Forecastable? In Looking at One-Year Returns, One Sees a Lot of Noise. But Over Longer Time Intervals the Noise Effectively Averages Out and Is Less Important."

"The Notion That Rich Valuations Will Not Be Followed By Sub-Par Long-Term Returns Is a Speculative Idea That Runs Counter to All Historical Evidence. It Is an Iron Law of Finance That Valuations Drive Long-Term Returns."

"It's January and the Temperature Is Below Freezing. If You Asked Me Whether It Will be Warmer or Cooler Next Tuesday, I Would Be Unable to Say. However, If You Asked Me What Temperature to Expect on April 9, I Could Predict "Warmer Than Today" and Almost Surely Be Right."

"If the Response Is "Who Knew?", It Won't Be Much Comfort for Retirees in the Employment Line at Wal-Mart. This is Especially True Since a Rational Understanding of History and the Drivers of Longer-Term Stock Returns Can Help Retirees To Avoid That Surprise."

"New of the Demise of the Random Walk Has Only Very Slowly Spread, In Part Because Its Overthrow Came as a Shock. If the Random Walk Hypothesis Were Correct, the Most Likely Return Would Be the Historic Average Return. The Evidence, However, Is Strongly Against This."

"I Don't Care If You Do or Don't Believe That the Market Will Behave Similarly in the Future As It Has in the Past. Either Way, This [The Stock-Return Predictor] Is an Excellent Way to Understand What the Market Has Done In the Past."

"It Really Is a Shame and Indefensible That So Many Feel the Need to Jump Into It With No Interest of Posting on the Topic But Just to Disrupt. Are You That Insecure? Some on the Forum Have an Interest in This Topic. If You Don't, Stay Out!"

"Irrational Behavior Does Follow Patterns. But How Many Experts in Behavioral Finance Believe That Such Knowledge Can Be Used to Predict Markets? Basically, None. Your Model Cannot Attain the Level of Predictive Value You Claim."

"The Safe Withdrawal Rate Studies Are Based on History. This [The Retirement Risk Evaluator] Shows, Based on the Same History, What the Probabilities Are for the Future at Various Starting Points. If the First Has Value, Then Surely This Does Too."

"There Are Hundreds of People Who Contributed to This. This Calculator [The Stock-Return Predictor] Demonstrates in a Compelling Way the Power of This New Internet Discussion-Board Communications Medium."

"A P/E10 of'26' Is Bad. Now Look at the 30-Year Return Predicted by the Calculator -- 5.4 Percent Real. That's Not Bad. There Are All Sorts of Strategic Implications That Follow From Understanding That Stocks Provide Different Sorts of Returns Over Different Sorts of Time-Periods."

"I Would Never Invest in Anything Without Having Any Idea What the Expected Return Is. For Instance, I Would Not Walk Into a Bank And Say "I'll Take One Certificate of Deposit, Please" WIthout Asking What Rate They Are Offering."

"I've Seen Things Said on Investing Boards That I Have Never Heard Said in Discussions of Any Non-Investing Topic. The Question of Whether Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns Is a Topic That Causes People More Emotional Angst Than Does Abortion or Impeachment Proceedings or the War in Iraq."

"It's Not Possible For Those Who Have Come to Believe That Stocks Are Always Best to Accept that Valuations Matter. The Two Beliefs Are Mutually Exclusive. If Valuations Matter, There Is Obviously Some Valuation Level At Which Stocks Are Not Best. The Two Paradigms Cannot Be Reconciled."

"Dear Rob -- I Just Became Aware of Your Past Research in September. Since Then, I've Read Archives From Many Discussion Boards and Websites, and I Always Find Your Writing to Be Very Interesting and Intriguing."

"I Think Rob Bennett Did Provide An Important Contribution in Terms of Describing a Way for P/E10 to Guide Asset Allocation for Long-Term Conservative Investors. I Also Think He Was Right on the Issue of Safe Withdrawal Rates."

"Because the Precise Timing of This Mean Reversion Is Not Known in Advance, Expecting the Result to Happen in the Short-Term Will Not Be Possible. But Long-Term Investors Who Can Be Patient Can Wait for This Mean Reversion and Will Eventually Come Out Ahead."

"Your Work Is at Odds with the Ethos of the Board -- Here the Theme is John Bogle's Philosophy, Which Eschews Market Timing. This Board Came Into Existence to ESCAPE One Individual, the Very Individual With Whom You Have Openly Aligned Yourself."

"Why Is It Such an Odious Violation of the Tenets of Bogleheadism to Explore Whether Someone Who Has Enough Patience Might Be Able to Benefit from the Transitory Nature of Speculative Returns (the Idea That the P/E Ratio Eventually Ends Up Where It Started)?"

"Let Me Explain Why I Posted About This Here. Valuation-Informed Indexing Has Had Critics for Years. But Until Norbert Did It In 2008, Nobody Seemed to Have Provided a Serious Investigation of It. I Couldn't Understand Why. That Bothered Me."

"If You Really Don't Like Market Timing in Any and All Forms, You May Not See Any Point in an Empirical Investigation. You View Me as One of a Long Line of Hucksters Trying to Sell You Some Snake Oil. I Don't Want to Be Such a Person."

"Having a Completely Ineleastic Demand for Equities Is a Bit Bonkers. No One Acts That Way with Life's Other Important Commodities. Campbell Advocates a Linear Valuations-Based Strategy so That You Wouldn't Be Making Big Changes. This Would Be Like Rebalancing But More Flexible."

"The Whole Idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing Belongs to You. Do You Mind if I call the Paper 'Valuation-Informed Indexing'? I Would Give You Credit. I Have Been Toying With the Idea of Sending the Paper to the Journal of Finance, Which Is the Most Prestigious Journal in Academic Finance."

"I Definitely Need to Cite You as the Founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, As I Have Not Found Anyone Else Who Can Lay Claim to That. Shiller Pointed Out the Predictive Power of P/E10 But Never Discussed How to Incorporate It Into Asset Allocation, As Far As I Know."

"I Tested a Wide Variety of Assumptions About Asset Allocation, Valuation-Based Decision Rules, Whether the Period Is 10, 20, 30 or 40 Years, and Lump-Sum vs. Dollar-Cost Averaging To Show That the Results Are Quite Robust to Changes In Any of These Assumptions."

"I Wrote Up the Programs to Test Your Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategies Against Buy-and-Hold and I Am Quite Excited. You Say in the RobCast That VII Should Beat Buy-and-Hold About 90 Percent of the Time. I Am Getting Results That Support This."

"Never Underestimate the Power of a Dominant Academic Idea to Choke Off Competing Ideas, and Never Underestimate the Unwillingness of Academics to Change Their Views in the Face of Evidence. They Have Decades of Their Research and Academic Standing to Defend."

"Since They Did Not Diagnose the Disease, There Is Little Popular Confidence That They Know the Cure. What If Economics Is, Actually, At the Same Level as Medicine Was When Doctors Still Believed in the Application of Leeches?"

"I Love the Humans Dearly (the Title of the Book I Am Writing Is Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life) But They Can Be a Trial at Times. Hey! Helping the Humans Learn What It Takes to Invest Effectively Is Not All That Different From Being Married!

"Wow, I Did Not Realize You Had Achieved This Much Success and Had Many Devoted Believers/Followers. That’s Great, Then Ignore the Opposition. It Is Great to Have Opposition: That Means You Are Doing Something Right."

"I Do NOT Believe I Know It All. I Believe That Shiller Discovered Something Very Important and It Appalls Me That More People Are Not Exploring the Implications of His Findings. My Aim Is To Launch a National Debate."

"I LOVE Everything About Buy-and-Hold Other Than the Failure to Encourage Investors to Take Price Into Consideration When Setting Their Stock Allocations. That's a Mistake That Was Made Because Shiller’s Research Was Not Available at the Time The Strategy Was Being Developed."

"Valuation-Informed Indexing Sounds Like a Real Thing. If It Is and I Can Thoroughly Understand It, Then It Will End Up In My Classrooms and in My Students' Minds (Of Course, With References to You and Wade)."

"As a Fan of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I Know That Progress Can Be Frustratingly Slow and What Is Typically Needed Is Either a Crisis or the Ascent of a New Generation of Scientists Who Did Not Build Their Careers on the Old Models and Theories."

"Rob Gets Himself So Worked Up Over What Someone Else Is Doing With Their Own Money and Not Bothering Rob in the Least. As Long As They Aren't Knocking on Your Basement Door, What Do You Care? They Are Happy and Content. Leave Well Enough Alone and Focus on Your Own Account."

"I've Been on Forum Since the BBS Days and I Think Rob is Special. He Could Be an Internet Meme If He Put Some Effort Into It. Someday, He Will Realize That the Only Thing He's Good At Is Being an Epic Loser. He Just Needs to Embrace That Idea and Run With It. Watch Out, LOLCats, Here Comes Pathetic Guy!"

"You Guys [the Greaney Goons] Are the Same Jokers Who Have Done This Before, Sparring with Rob Over Nonsensical Issues On This Site and Others, Leveling Personal Attacks, and You Don't Even Use Real Names! Rob Is Entitled to His Opinion, But the Fact That You Challenge Every Jot and Tittle of What He Says Makes It Clear You Have An Unholy Agenda. Please Take It Elsehwere."

"Rob, Take This As Friendly Advice. You're a Smart and Articulate Guy and You Could Be Making Valuable Contributions to This Discussion. I've Dealt with the Mentally Ill Before and I've Found That They Sometimes Can Be Reasonable If Gently Redirected."

"I’m a Numbers Guy. And I Believe I Understand Rob’s Thesis, that Future Returns, Over the Next Decade, Have a Tight Inverse Correlation to the PE10 for the Starting Point. Remember, Correlation Doesn’t Need to be 100%, Only That There’s a Bell Curve of Potential Outcomes that Shift Meaningfully Based on the Input."

"I Have had Academic Researchers Tell Me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to do Honest Research Once Again. I Have had Investment Advisors Tell me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to Give Honest Investing Advice Again."

"Let’s Call a Spade a Spade, Shall We? Wade Pfau Stole Your Research and Put His Name on it, Throwing You Just a Tiny Crumb of Acknowledgement to Ward Off a Lawsuit. He’s Profiting Handsomely By His Theft, Leading a Charmed Life, Widely Published, Widely Respected. While Rob Bennett Continues to Toil in Total Obscurity. It’s So Incredibly Unfair, I Think If It Happened to Me, It Could Actually Drive Me Insane."

“I Detected a Coldness in the Vibe in the Room When I Was Giving My Talk. If You Talk to an Alcoholic About Cutting Back on Drinking, He Will Deny Having a Problem. That’s Not Because He Believes Deep In His Heart That He Doesn’t Have a Problem. My Stuff Made the Bloggers in the Room Feel Shame.”

Didn’t a coach in the Financial Blogger audience tell you that you came across as bitter?

You are thinking of Jaime Tardy, owner of the Eventual Millionaire site.

I talked to Jaime at FinCon13 and told her I would like to hire her for help with spreading the word about Valuation-Informed Indexing. She asked me a number of questions about the VII concept and about my experiences spreading the word on it and all this sort of thing. She was in the audience when I gave my Ignite presentation (“How to Become the Most Hated Blogger on the Internet”). She said that she was sitting with a number of millionaires when I gave the talk (there is a video of the 5-minute talk at the home page of this site) and that a number of them offered the view that I was “bitter.” She didn’t say that she agreed with them (she said that she found my ability to stick to my guns in the face of such brutal opposition “inspiring”). But she said that she did not want to work with me unless I agreed to no longer engage with “the haters” (she was referring to you Goons).

I am certain that Jaime was shooting straight re what the millionaire bloggers said. I detected a coldness in the vibe in the room when I was giving my talk. My impressions are vague ones. But I think I am good at picking this sort of thing up and I obviously have a lot of experience watching reactions re this particular issue. I got a VERY positive reaction when they announced the title of the talk. People laughed and applauded, more than they had for any of the other speakers. I found that very encouraging. I felt at the beginning of the talk that I had the crowd in the palm of my hand. There was a second round of laughter and applause after I said the first few lines. And then I never heard any further reactions until the applause at the end of the talk (which sounded to me to be equal to that given all the other talks). There was never any booing. People were not hostile. But the reaction to the material following the title and the first few lines (my recollection is that the line that got people laughing a second time was a line about how I had been banned at 15 different places) was subdued. I no longer felt that I had the crowd in the palm of my hand as the talk progressed.

There was lots of powerful stuff in the talk, stuff that in ordinary circumstances would get people excited in a positive way. For example, I noted that I had produced with Wade Pfau research that shows millions of middle-class people how to reduce risk by 70 percent. The ordinary reaction to this would be for the bloggers to come up to me to ask how they could get involved in the effort to spread the word about Valuation-Informed Indexing all over the internet. Not one person has asked me that as a result of the talk (my e-mail address is available in the conference materials). That tells me something.

There were several people who came up to talk to me when the presentations ended. One was Joe Taxpayer. Joe ended up including me in his write-up re the conference and saying that you Goons should permit honest posting on Shiller’s findings. One of the other people who came up said that I should play up the “Most Hated Blogger” thing in all my marketing. I think that makes sense but I already do that to at least a limited extent. Another blogger congratulated me and then followed up with an e-mail following the conference (to which I responded) but has not yet done anything more than that. Another blogger said that I should send out lots of promotional materials noting that Shiller recently won the Nobel prize. I agree that that makes perfect sense. But I have zero confidence that that would help in the particular circumstances that apply in this case. People were not banning the discussion of Valuation-Informed Indexing because Shiller had not won a Nobel prize and the award is not going to change things in any significant way. The awarding of the Nobel prize is a small plus but not a game-changer.

There are no intellectual issues here. The intellectual case for Valuation-Informed Indexing is overwhelming. ALL of the evidence supports it and there is no evidence supporting Buy-and-Hold. The issues holding us back are all PSYCHOLOGICAL in nature.

The people who get it best are the academics to whom I wrote about the Wade Pfau matter and who came back to me saying that this is a case of the sort of paradigm change described in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. A society accepts small advances without too much trouble. It has a much harder time with big advances. This is a HUGE advance. It changes life in the United States forever for us to be able to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. It is of course a hugely POSITIVE change. But it is a huge change all the same. And as a society we are having a hard time accepting that this huge positive change is a real thing.

One of the academics told me that we either need to wait for the people whose careers were built promoting Buy-and-Hold to die or for a crisis. If Shiller is right (I obviously believe that he is), the crisis is coming within the next year or two or three. That should do it. The next price crash should shake people up enough that they will hear out people who go forward with the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. Once we reach a certain acceptance level, support for Buy-and-Hold will collapse and VII will spread like wildfire.

The question is — Should we just wait around for that to happen?

My sense is that that is how Shiller and a lot of others have elected to play it. There are a good number of people who hint at a belief in VII but who hold back from a full endorsement of all of the amazing implications of Shiller’s research because they know that Buy-and-Holders will go nuts if they go public with them. I obviously don’t play it that way. I believe that responsible people should be doing everything they can do to help us AVOID another price crash. I also believe that, once people are ready to hear about VII, we need to have a record that people can turn to for answers to all of their questions about why it took so long for us to get to a good place. So I believe in continuing to knock on doors and on detailing the results of those efforts here at the blog.

People have a wall of resistance to hearing about this stuff. A good part of it is shame.

I call out the Wall Street Con Men all the time. But the full reality is that all that the Wall Street Con Men are doing is trying to make a sale. You complete a sale by forming an emotional connection with your reader. People love Get Rich Quick. Buy-and-Hold is pure Get Rich Quick. It sells like hotcakes. So the Wall Street Con Men love to use it. They go with what works.

The point here is that it takes two to tango. The Wall Street Con Men are conning us. They obviously know that there is this fellow Shiller who showed 33 years ago that valuations affect long-term return and that there is zero chance that Buy-and-Hold can work if valuations affect long-term returns. But they keep it zipped because their readers and their clients DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT. Mike Piper did not want to ban honest posting at his blog. He HATED the idea. But he sincerely believed that his readers would abandon him if he permitted me to continue posting there about the implications of Shiller’s research. I don’t know that things are quite as bad as he believes. But I do agree with Mike that he would have taken a big hit. For Mike Piper permitting honest posting would have meant earning less money from his blog, at least in the short run.

That’s not true just of Mike. It’s true of Motley Fool. It’s true of Morningstar. It’s true of Index Universe. It’s true of just about everyone. Buy-and-Hold is a marketer’s dream. It’s a Get Rich Quick approach that sounds responsible if you don’t study it too closely. Valuation-Informed Indexers tell people that much of the money in their retirement portfolios is not real, that it is cotton candy fated soon to be blown away in the wind. Buy-and-Hold is a Snickers bar and VII is spinach. VII is a hard sell compared to Buy-and-Hold until the next crash shows people where Get Rich Quick always takes everyone who follows it in the end.

This is a one-time thing. VII was impossible before 1981 because we didn’t have the research to support it. It didn’t catch on through 2008 because people were too happy with their phony bull market gains to be open to considering a new strategy. Since 2008, the door has been opened a bit. But it appears that it is going to take another crash to kick the door open all the way. Those are the realities that apply.

The next part is a little hard for most people to understand. But it is rooted in a psychological reality. People often know things that they are not willing to acknowledge they know. If you talk to an alcoholic about cutting back on drinking, he will deny having a problem. That’s not because he believes deep in his heart that he does not have a problem. It’s because he knows ten times better than you do how big the problem is and cannot bear to have you say the words out loud. The alcoholic is in deep denial. But he of course knows. That’s the story of the Buy-and-Holder. Every Buy-and-Holder has doubts about his strategy. Buy-and-Holders hate Rob Bennett because Rob Bennett spells out all the reasons why those doubts are legitimate. My stuff causes people to feel emotional pain.

The millionaire bloggers in the audience for my Ignite talk have probably followed Buy-and-Hold themselves and have probably recommended it to others. So my stuff made them feel shame. They are not ready to acknowledge what the research says. So they need some psychological defense. They felt that my presentation was too compelling to argue against it on substantive grounds. So they attacked it on process-oriented grounds. I wasn’t wrong. I just was too “bitter” about the fact that the ideas haven’t caught on yet. I deliberately chose images for the slides that focused on the soft, funny side of things. There was nothing even a tiny bit bitter about my presentation. That assessment was employed as part of a psychological defense.

We are making progress. I wouldn’t have been permitted to give the Ignite talk a few years ago. Now I am able to do that. Now I can get guest blog entries posted at lots of places. There are more and more people expressing doubts about Buy-and-Hold every day. But, yes, as of today there are smart and good people in this world who are going to respond by saying that I am “bitter” when they hear my presentation. Jaime was shooting straight with me and reporting on the reality that applies today. I liked the idea of working with her. I think that she could provide something that I am not able to provide. But I at least learned something as a result of my association with her and I am of course grateful for that.

Comments

It is funny how you ignore all the advice given to you, yet you seem to think you know how everyone else”feels” and “thinks”. By you avoiding the truth, you have been banned, ignored and /or considered by many to just being a nut job.

You really need to consider the results. As you have admitted, no one is following your lead. You ignore the obvious and think it is all part of a goon conspiracy. Stop ignoring the truth.

For the record, I do not believe that it is ALL the result of a Goon conspiracy, Anonymous.

The Goons have played a highly negative role. We would all be in a much better place but for the bad behavior of you Goons.

But you Goons could not have done what you have done had Motley Fool given Greaney the boot back in June 2002, when I notified them of the problem. And we all would be in a much better place if Index Universe had acted differently or if Morningstar had acted differently or if Bogle had acted differently or even if Wade Pfau had acted differently.

I say that the Goons are a part of the problem, a big part. I don’t say that the Goons are the entire problem. The Normals tolerate you Goons. The Normals need to accept responsibility for the role they have played as much as the Goons need to accept responsibility for the role they have played.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

Shiller showed that stock investing cannot be understood at all well by merely looking at numbers. Mispricing is an emotional phenomenon. We have to try to understand human psychology if we are to have any success at trying to understand how the market works in the real world.

I don’t say that I get it all right. But I think it is fair to say that I always try to consider the emotional side of things (as reflected in the P/E10 metric). That’s one big step better than the alternative, eh?

A community member named "James" wrote in an e-mail:
"I just listened to your podcast on Buy-and-Hold Cannot Work. I was referred to it by a friend with whom I have recently been discussing the same concepts.
"What you don't mention in this podcast is the primary basis for the Stay-the-Course concept. As I understand it, the idea is that: The market is smarter than any one individual and automatically prices value effects into itself. Ergo, it's safe to be passive!
"Quite…

I drove my mother to Atlantic City on Saturday. I don't gamble (except in poker games with friends) So I spent much of the day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk writing articles for the web site.
One of them is entitled "Investor Emotions." The article attempts to correlate the emotion with the greatest influence on investor psychology at a given time with the P/E10 value that applies at that time. It's highly tentative stuff. But it's potentially highly significant stuff too.
Our most…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a discussion of a blog entry at this site:
Say that the Phillies are playing the Yankees in the World Series and that it is the seventh game and that you do a statistical analysis showing that the pitcher they have slated to go is not up to the job. Say that you write this in a column with the aim of persuading the manager to use a different pitcher who according to your statistical analysis is more likely to win the game.
Is…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a discussion thread at this blog:
Rob,
Since you believe that you are right and everyone else is wrong, you must have a massive net worth by now. Care to share the details?
We all believe we are right, Sparky.
You believe you are right. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.
The difference between me and you is that, while I believe I am right, I ALSO believe that it is possible that I could be missing something…

Set forth below is the text of a comment recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
The lack of any supporting comments on this board speaks volumes, Rob. No, people are not afraid to post here as they would be anonymous.
The lack of supporting comments certainly tells us something important, Anonymous. You and I do not agree re what it tells us. But we are 100 percent in agreement that it is a telling reality.
You are of course correct that people are free to post anonymously…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the The Oblivious Investor blog entitled Dogma Is the Enemy of the Middle-Class Investor.
Juicy Excerpt: Perhaps I’m wrong. If so, I’d like to find that out. Or perhaps I’m right. Either way, what’s needed today is a national debate on the merits and flaws of the conventional investing wisdom.
A rockin' comments section on this one.
Juicy Excerpt: Does it make sense to pay attention to how much you’re paying for something? Of course…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the discussion of a blog entry posted at this site:
When is your interview with Psychology Today?
I understand that you are being sarcastic, Sparky.
But an interview with Psychology Today would be 100 percent appropriate and 100 percent wonderful. I look forward to the opportunity to participate in such an interview.
The Buy-and-Holders achieved an amazing advance in rooting their strategies in the academic research. I…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
“PERMITTING HONEST POSTING.”
Can you please define what you mean by that. I am unaware of any topic that has not been discussed.
That’s a good question, Anonymous.
What’s honest for you is not the same as what is honest for me.
You believe in Buy-and-Hold. So you can put up a post saying “a high stock allocation makes sense today” or “there’s no reason to believe…

I've added Elizabeth's story to the Middle-Class Millionaires section of the site.
Juicy Excerpt: I woke up around DJI 13200, realized I had a lot to learn and had better learn it fast, and found this site. I now have cash sitting in MMFs that has not disappeared out of my retirement funds. I also have much more confidence in my ability to understand what is happening and to respond appropriately as the situation evolves.... I thank you for your public service and, in another dimension,…

Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent to the owner of the Frugal Dad blog on June 3.
Jason:
This is Rob Bennett, author of the "A Rich Life" blog. I hope things are going well with you.
I would be grateful if you would consider the submission below for possible posting at your site as a Guest Blog Entry. In the event that you choose not to use it, I would be grateful if you would let me know so that I can shop it elsewhere.
Thanks.
Rob
The submission was…

Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent last week to my friend Brian. Brian and I became friends during my days as a Capitol Hill reporter. We have stayed in touch in the years since. Brian asked: "If everyone (or the vast majority) has lost money, are we really any poorer?"
Brian:
You're asking a penetrating question. I wish that everyone would take some time and think this one through. If they did, that would help a lot.
The full reality is that there has been no…

What do you know? How do you know it?
You need to know certain things to get from the place where you are when you pull yourself out of your bed in the morning to the place where you are will be when you throw yourself back into it at night. For example, you need to know about gravity. If not for gravity, you would need to dress differently. You might need to wear heavy boots to keep from floating off into space. Gravity matters. Since you know that gravity exists, you keep this reality in…

Sometimes I say things in the heat of the moment just to have something to say and, then later, when I read the words back, they make sense! It sometimes really does happen that way. It makes me wonder if there really is a God or something.
Some Goon was sticking his elbows out at me in comments he put to a recent blog entry and I went into my usual riff about how all you need is love and love is the answer and what the world needs now is love, sweet love, blah, blah, blah, blee, blee. blee.…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
And it's very important to those new folks clicking on your site for the first time imagining it might be a place where they could learn something about the S&P 500 Index market timing scheme you're trying to peddle to watch you rehash all those old comments. At least it won't take them long to realize they're wasting their time if they thought the Plop would be a source of how one could…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
I agree it's entirely possible that the stock market (i.e., the S&P 500 Index) could drop precipitously for any number of "real-world problems, geopolitical turmoil, economic weakness, high unemployment, you name it." There's a quote from Tolstoy that sums up precisely the trouble that you are having understanding how stock investing works, Yip. He said (I am paraphrasing): "There is no concept…

I've seen loyalty. I've seen deception. I've seen friendship. I've seen intimidation. I've seen responsibility. I've seen willful ignorance. I've seen generosity. I've seen arrogance. I've seen courage. I've seen cowardice.
And that's just on internet discussion boards dealing with the topic of stock investing!
It's humans who buy stocks. That rarely noted fact explains why the conventional advice re how to invest for the long term does not work. The conventional advice is rooted in an…

My wife and I were driving down the road the other day and we passed a Ruby Tuesday restaurant. "What was that song supposed to be about, anyway?" she asked. I said that it was about a hippie-chick who was so unwilling to become tied down by social norms that she refused to answer to any one name.
This got me to thinking about stocks.
Stocks are like hippies in that they are always changing their look. In the last three years of the 1990s, the DOW went up by about 30 percent a year. There…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the Goon Central board:
Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
it's just that not enough folks have yet been introduced to your insanity profound insights in order to create a tipping point which will make the Hocomania Wave unstoppable! Yes, it's a Tipping Point thing.
EVERYONE (including you, Yip!) knows that GRQ is garbage. That's close to…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
Hocus, that a 65% drop is the DEFAULT position is just absurd. Breathtakingly absurd.
Was it absurd that the safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 percent back when I first reported that it was 1.6 percent?
The Nisiprius post at Bogleheads yesterday hit it on the head.
Anything less than 7 percent was absurd in the mid-90s.
Then anything less than 4 percent was absurd after the Old School SWR…

Set forth below are the words of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
I'm afraid you're going to have to settle for the "cotton candy" money everyone else accepts without question but which you turn your nose up at!
There's a limited sense in which it is so that I have to "settle" for the cotton candy money that many accept without question. I don't need to invest in stocks at times of insane overvaluation. But I am affected by the economic crisis that follows when…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the Goon Central board:
Hocus, you've been predicting the stock market (which of course we know on HocoWorld refers solely to the S&P 500 Index) will drop by 65% within three years. I just wanted to establish a firm date, since we know you to be less than truthful after the fact on various issues. Goes with the territory when you're a Habitual Liar like Rob "hocus" Bennett I guess!
I believe you made your…

Yesterday's blog entry set forth the text of a post that I put to the Suckers Buy It! forum on the topic of How Minds Change. Set forth below is the text of a follow-up post:
when you’re dealing with people who have a cult like allegiance to a thought or ideal, I guess it’s not such a stretch. Anyway, a belated welcome to the club of Jindiviks (aboriginal for the hunted one).
Thanks for letting me into the club, Jindvick. I think!
The question that I am always focused on (because…

I am a Catholic. That means that I pay regular visits to the confession box.
My guess is that those of other faiths do similar sorts of things. I know that people in 12-step programs occasionally "take a fearless moral inventory." It sounds like it is something along the lines of a whole bunch of trips to the confession box rolled into one.
There are two things about the confession-box experience that just about everybody who goes through it remarks upon. It feels awful going in. It feels…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Rob,
Specifically, who are the goons? What makes them goons? Who are the leaders of the goons? Who are the goons that are most responsible for what you see as the problems? Are we talking about a handful of goons or just a small select group? How do I spot a goon?
A Goon is someone who is too filled with hate and fear to have a constructive discussion.
We ALL have goonishness within us.…

Set forth below is the text of a thread-starter that I put to the Goon Central board:
A lot of people are saying that explanation for Obama's sub-par debate performance is that he was been protected from effective questioning for years by an adoring media.I see the same sort of phenomenon going on with the Buy-and-Holders. They tell each other that they have it all figured out, that everyone is wrong but them. It makes them feel good when they silence those reporting on the last 30…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Buy and Hold is “get rich slowly”
That certainly is how it is promoted, Sensible.And I believe strongly that that is what the people promoting it believe it to be.
And I believe strongly that that is what the people following it believe it to be.
But I do not believe it to be that.
And I don’t say that because of some sort of bias against Buy-and-Hold. I…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Investor Junkie blog:
Rob,
I approve comments that make legit counterpoints. I do not know the full history with Early Retirement Forum, nor do I personally care.
His comment is a legit question (though the personal attack is not). If the commentator does not keep it on topic, he will be banned and comments removed (same applies to you also).
Otherwise I do not moderate and allow each to have their own opinion.
I…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
I don’t know Rob, the ability to make guesses about the future and get them wrong doesn’t seem like a very valuable skill.
It’s not, Anonymous. We couldn’t possibly agree more.
But people have been doing it since the beginning of time, haven’t they?
That’s why I love the idea of rooting one’s strategies in the peer-reviewed research so freakin’ much!
Doing that gets…

A recent Washington Post article argues that: “Humans, no matter how hard we try, act in ways that cause us to make the wrong investment decisions almost all the time.”
I like the lyrics but not the melody to which they are attached.
The guy writing the article describes how he made a poor investing decision. He looked into Behavioral Finance and concluded that his problem is that even the smartest among us are not capable of making good investing decisions, that “when it comes to…

Set forth below is the text of a thread-starter that I put to the Goon Central board:
This is tentative. I think I am beginning to make some slow progress in getting the e-mails out.I should have had hundreds of them out by now. I think the number was about 12 through yesterday. For today, I think it will be five or six more. No great leap forward. But small movement in the right direction. My hope is that the next week will be better.I believe that the same emotional roadblocks that…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted at another blog entry at this site:
It sure does take this VII a LONG time to work. 15 years now and still vastly inferior returns to anyone using buy and hold. It would take now a greater than 65% drop in equities to even be on equal footing and that doesn’t even account for rebalancing and how much more conservative a persons portfolio would have become over the course of 15 years. VII where you can spend 20 years stashing…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I put today to a discussion thread at the Free Money Finance blog on the topic of the merits or lack thereof of market timing:
Thanks for your kind words and thanks for indeed adding some thoughts that those listening in here very much need to take into consideration, MBTN There's no question (at least in my mind, but I believe that I probably speak for a lot of people re this one) that you are making an important point.
Stock prices can be…

I'm excited about a book I've begun reading entitled The Wisdom of Crowds. The Introduction explains in compelling terms both the reasons why the discussion board is potentially such a powerful communications medium and why it is only when reasonable posting rules are enforced in reasonable ways that this communications medium is able to achieve its potential.
Here's the key claim put forward by James Surowiecki (the book's author): "If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group…

Set forth below is a comment that I posted in response to a comment by a community member named "What" on the discussion thread for the blog entry titled It Breaks My Heart When People Don't Comment on My Investing Posts.
All you did was point out some underlying assumptions and limitations of the study that any educated reader already knew and understood.
No.
I was at the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board in the years when people were putting up threads on a daily basis about…

1) When you ask direct questions about things you've seen in the historical stock-return data, all you hear in response are vague references to "efficient market theory" which do not really seem to be responsive to the questions asked.
2) When you raise the possibility that maybe you allowed yourself to get in this thing too far too fast, the glib reply is: "You and me are in this together for the long-term, aren't we, babe?"
3) When you point out that you still don't have a ring on your…

I recently posted a Letter to the Editor at John Walter Russell's site entitled Rational Investors Do Not Become Permabears!
Juicy Excerpt: To be a perma-bear is as bad as to be a Passive Investor. The two psychologies are two sides of the same emotional coin. The biggest danger we face today is that millions of middle-class investors are going to become perma-bears because they fell for the Passive Investing gibberish and are now disillusioned with how it works in the real world. Stocks…

There have been several occasions on which the Greaney Goons have invaded this site and tried to bring the discussions held here into the sewer to which they have pulled discussions held at a number of our Retire Early discussions boards. My reaction? I deleted the posts. In several instances, I banned the posters involved from further participation here.
David Forrest has banned honest posting on safe withdrawal rates at the Motley Fool site. Bill Sholar has banned honest posting on safe…

You hear these guys all the time. They can be highly judgmental.
"Dickens was wrong. These people with their credit-card debt should be put in prison. Thank you, God, for making me so much better than them." That sort of thing.
Then the subject of bull markets comes up. They're doing a happy dance. They're rolling the dice and singing that "Baby needs a new pair of shoes!" It's an entirely different tune.
Huh?
What's bad about credit-card debt? Living on credit-card debt is living a…

An earlier blog entry (Do We Like What Comes from Telling Lies to Ourselves re What Our Stock Portfolios Are Worth?) reported on my recent correspondence with my friend Brian. Brian recently sent a follow-up e-mail. The text of my response to the follow-up e-mail is set forth below.
Brian:
Your thought that people often gain more from losing money than from accumulating it is a far-reaching one.
I agree in part but I strongly disagree in part too.
The title of my blog is "A Rich…

Many investors acknowledge that we all were feeling greedy back in the 1990s. But now that stocks have performed poorly for over eight years, those days are behind us. The problem today is that, if things keep going like they have been going lately, it is our feelings of fear that will be getting out of control.
Right?
Not right.
Today’s P/E10 value is 25. We are now at one of the highest valuation levels experienced in the history of the U.S. market. Stocks have never given a strong…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Suckers Buy It! forum:
No one here is trying to convince people not to use SBI.
My thought is that it would be a good idea to give this expression of intent greater emphasis.
I have experience with this sort of thing.
There are people who believe firmly, strongly and without any acknowledgment of doubt that my investing ideas are wrong. They believe this so strongly that they won’t permit other people — who…

Intimidation undermines science.
Intimidation interferes with the reasoning process.
Intimidation causes confusion.
Intimidation turns friend against friend.
Intimidation biases research.
Intimidation can trump logic for a time.
Intimidation causes worry about the long term because intimidation cannot trump logic indefinitely.
The use of intimidation reveals the weakness of an argument.
Intimidation is bad manners.
The desire to make use of intimidation comes from a…

Today's blog entry is a guest post by Arty, one of the best contributors to the Retire Early and Indexing discussion-board communities in recent years. I've read hundreds of articles about our economic crisis. Few have made the key point about the cause of the crash as clearly and succinctly as the words below.
Arty put forward the words as a comment to the blog entry entitled "This Month's Permanent Portfolio," where he also offered dozens of other comments also worth checking…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
How do you feel about people you meet who make such enormously boastful (and in this case easily disprovable) statements? Are you attracted to those people? Do such antisocial behaviors earn them many friends?
People don’t like boasting. That’s certainly so.
But those words are required by the job I am doing here, Anonymous.
The Buy-and-Holders are in a trap. When the…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted at another blog entry at this site:
Didn’t a coach in the Financial Blogger audience tell you that you came across as bitter?
You are thinking of Jaime Tardy, owner of the Eventual Millionaire site.
I talked to Jaime at FinCon13 and told her I would like to hire her for help with spreading the word about Valuation-Informed Indexing. She asked me a number of questions about the VII concept and about my experiences…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Rob, do you think the news about the US handing control of ICANN to the international community will be good for honest posting?
I know next to nothing about it. So it’s not right for me to venture an opinion. The tiny bit I have read about it has been negative.
The one thing that I can say is that it is not procedural issues that are the problem. The published rules at the Motley Fool…

I recently posted a Letter to the Editor at www.Early-Retirement-Planning-Insights.com site entitled Michael is Asking Cutting-Edge Questions.
Juicy Excerpt: As we move deeper into a Rational Investing analysis (it is rational to accept that emotions matter), we will be confronting more and more questions that are more psychological than statistical in nature (but in many cases looking at the data will help us come to a better informed understanding of psychological realities). We need to…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
It is so common to see as these leading financial experts threatening people with prison and lawsuits.
It is not common at all to see leading financial experts refer to the need for prison sentences for you Goons, Anonymous. That’s why we are in an economic crisis.
I was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. I gave it up on the evening of August 27, 2002. That’s the night…

Men posters outnumber women posters by a 10 to 1 ratio at the raddr-pages.com discussion board on early retirement topics. Is the financial freedom quest "a guy thing"?
I say "no." My experience with my book has been that women respond to it more strongly than men. My sense is that women and men respond to different aspects of the financial freedom question.
Ask a man if it is a good idea to pay off the mortgage and he is likely to start performing calculations to determine whether he can…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
You put things out there that provoke people and then act like a victim.
Did my famous post of May 13, 2002, pointing out the errors in John Greaney’s retirement study provoke people?
It did.
I know because I was there. Lots of people who I consider friends used that study to make decisions as to when to hand in resignations from high-paying jobs and then live only on their savings…

I recently posted the following words -- titled How Minds Change -- to the Suckers Buy It! forum:
A2DKristi said (in the thread on university courses) that:
I just finished reading the entire “No Trolls Allowed” thread from the SBI forum (I love that people send me this stuff), and believe me, these people worship Ken like he’s the messiah, and talk about me like I’m the devil.
They simply don’t care.
I have lots of personal experience with the phenomenon that you are…